Viacom, the media conglomerate best known for its MTV and BET franchises, agreed today, to license its television shows and movies to Joost, a European-based online video distribution channel.
Joost was founded by Nilas Aennstrom and Janus Friis, the people who brought you Kazaa and Voice Over Internet Protocol megalith Skype.
Under the deal, MTV, Nickelodeon and BET television networks and Viacom’s Paramount Studios will license shows and movies for the Joost Internet platform, which is still in testing. The announcement comes just two weeks after Viacom yanked Comedy Central clips and its other content from Google’s YouTube, citing copyright concerns.
The proposed deal strikes two blows to the nascent, online entertainment, distribution community. The first blow is struck against YouTube, which of late has been trying to upgrade its image from that of “the Internet’s Public Access Channel” and a potent place of piracy. The second blow is one for Joost founders Zennstrom and Friis. Their earlier online technological achievements had made them mainstream media outcasts. Kazaa enraged the music industry because it enabled free trading of music content; Skype attacked walls of traditional telephone oligarchies because its technology drastically reduced the cost of telephony while also vastly increasing its reach.
According to its website, Joost is “powered by a secure, efficient, piracy-proof internet platform, Joost enables a high-quality video experience based on premium content, while guaranteeing copyright protection for content owners and creators.”
Viacom announced some of the shows it will license include MTV’s Real World, Beavis and Butthead, and Comedy Central staples Freak Show and Stella.
